What Tony is reading

I'm up to chapter 7 of The Namesake. The more I enjoy a book, the slower I read it, because I don't want it to end. I am reading The Namesake at home. On the subway in the morning I am revising my novel. I can get through 5 to 20 pp, depending on how much marking up I have to do. I don't continue editing my novel on the ride home. It's better to let the thoughts marinate anyway--sometimes better choices come to me. If I'm not too tired on the way home or I don't have too many groceries, I'm carrying around a collection of short stories with me these days. I don't remember the last time I read Thomas Wolfe, but the collection includes a story of his called "The Far and The Near." I own two or three of his novels, which I have picked up over the years, but I haven't read them, and now I think I should. Wolfe's is a voice I want to know more. Here is a sentence from "The Far and The Near," which is about a locomotive engineer who notices a house on the edge of a small town as he drives a train over the same route for decades:

But no matter what peril or tragedy he had known, the vision of the little house and the women waving to him with a brave free motion of the arm had become fixed in the mind of the engineer as something beautiful and enduring, something beyond all change and ruin, and something that would always be the same, no matter what mishap, grief or error might break the iron schedule of his days.

That’s 73 words, not forced, not too heavy--and you can feel the engineer in his train going past the house and on down the track.